Writer and intellectural Bernard-Henri Lévy would rather be known for his
philosophy than for his physique

Bernard-Henri Lévy never said: “God is dead, but my hair is beautiful.” Still he admires the satirist who put the words in his mouth. “It’s very clever if you think about it,” he says with a small smile. “It was completely made up and yet it has been repeated endlessly by people ever since.”

Today the French philosopher’s hair is beautiful and defiant – standing out from his head in leonine waves and his trademark outfit (a black Charvet suit and white shirt, unbuttoned to the navel) has a Gallic shrug all of its own (“Oui – et alors?”).

It’s the morning after the Cannes premiere of his documentary on the Libyan revolution, The Oath of Tobruk – a film for which Harvey Weinstein has since bought the rights – and Lévy has barely slept. “I’ve never needed much sleep,” he says. “I prefer to work at night.” This could be because the 63-year-old writer, intellectual and defender of the world’s oppressed has less noble pursuits during daylight hours. After all, it was the man not his satirist who said: “You can’t make love all day.”

“Literature and love-making demand the same energy,” he explains. “And since one cannot make love all day – one must write for some of it.”

For the past year, Lévy has taken a break from love-making to pursue the Libyan cause. In the documentary version of his recent book, War Without Loving It, we see the Libyan revolution from BHL’s personal perspective. Having travelled to Libya as a journalist, Lévy met the rebels fighting against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, later persuading Nicolas Sarkozy to take action by recognising the leaders of the emerging Libyan opposition party and implementing a no-fly zone. The film is poignant, insightful – featuring interviews with Sarkozy, David Cameron and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – and occasionally comic (silhouetted against the burnished Libyan planes, the philosopher looks like he might at any moment start spritzing himself with Christian Dior Fahrenheit aftershave), but there’s no denying his courage.

The French may accuse the multi-millionaire of being a pampered radical (or, as one friend sneers, “the Simon Cowell of intellectuals”) but Lévy is anything but an armchair philosopher. He covered the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan as a young man, called for intervention in the Bosnian war and spoke out early against the alleged Serbian concentration camps. In 2002, he spent a year in Pakistan trying to uncover the truth behind Daniel Pearl’s execution and until Gaddafi’s death in October, Lévy had a $5.8 million price on his head. “Why the eight?” he chuckles. “I still don’t know.” We laugh, but even now, Special Forces are at the neighbouring table. BHL’s decision to invite two Syrian dissidents to attend Tobruk’s premiere has once again put the writer under threat. Isn’t he scared? “Of course,” he shrugs. “The writer Céline once said that the only people who aren’t scared are those without imagination. There was a scary moment when we were standing in Tripoli’s Green Square and there were snipers all over the place. Had I betrayed even the slightest sign of fear to my companions, someone would have filmed it and put it on the internet. That helped me keep it together.”

It may have served him well in that instance, but in the past BHL’s vanity has been feasted on by his detractors. In Public Enemies, a book of letters between Lévy and the French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, he claims: “Few writers are abused as much as I am.” Why does he think that is? “I don’t know and I don’t care,” he says, taking a sip of tea. “Really. Watching all these people get worked up makes me laugh. It tends to be more men than women…”

Jealousy, one assumes. While there’s no denying Lévy’s extraordinary intelligence, he doesn’t help himself by semi-parodying the looks he was born with. “There is a Chinese proverb: when the wise man points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger. Now I’m not saying that I’m the wise man, but when I show Daniel Pearl’s Pakistan or the war in Libya – the imbecile will look at the shirt.”

I must be an imbecile then, because I’m looking at the shirt. “It’s unbuttoned,” I point out – needlessly. We both stare down at the plunging triangle of prime BHL flesh. “Yes, it’s unbuttoned.” Isn’t that an act of pure provocation? Isn’t it the equivalent of a woman in a short skirt asking to be prized for her intellect? “No, it’s not an act of provocation. When I get dressed, I don’t decide: it’s a physical thing.” I understand: it’s his brand. “No!” He doesn’t like that. “It’s not my brand – it’s my way of being. There have been problems, incidents. When I went to see the Pope, protocol dictated that one had to wear a tie. In the 1970s, when Giscard d’Estaing was President you had to wear a tie, too, but I wouldn’t put a tie on. For me, it’s a physical impossibility: I would suffocate.”

My point, though, is that Lévy clearly enjoys his own physique. “No,” he flings back, exasperated. “I am at ease with my body, but I don’t enjoy my body.” So how many times a day does he look at himself in the mirror? “I never look at myself in the mirror,” he assures me, laughing now. “I promise you.” But what about The Hair? “I’ll run my hands through it or a brush, and that’s it.” Exhausted by the debate, I wonder aloud why hair is such a big deal with men. “Because it’s really about their virility, maybe?” he sighs. “But I don’t have a problem with my virility – I really don’t.”

Few would contradict thrice-married BHL on that point. Currently married to pneumatic French actress and singer Arielle Dombasle and a father of two (he has a daughter, Justine, from his first marriage and a son, Antonin-Balthazar, from his second), Lévy is rumoured to have a woman in every port. Still it wasn’t until his recent relationship with British heiress Daphne Guinness (whether or not it is ongoing is unclear) that he transgressed French marital rules and became the subject of vulgar gossip. “I never speak of my personal life. Ever,” he says tightly when I question him on the subject. Understood. I’m curious, though: theoretically speaking, are philosophers more pragmatic than the rest of us about affairs of the heart? “No,” he says after a moment’s pause. “Humans are all equal in suffering, death and love.” Another theoretical question: “Can a man be in love with more than one person at a time?” “A man or this man?” he asks with a narrowing of the eyes. A man – since I’m not allowed to ask this man. “Then absolutely yes. There was a sentence in my first book, [La Barbarie à Visage Humain] in which I describe man as 'a failed species’ – and that could be one of our failures.”

Born in French Algeria, to a wealthy Jewish timber magnate father, Lévy moved to Paris when he was still a baby. His elegant young mother would take him to fashion shows when he was a boy and he remembers “feeling a great deal of emotion when I looked at the models – the equivalent of an erotic emotion. I was dumbfounded by the grace of women.” Women were to be one of two great passions. As he grew more and more engrossed in the political and philosophical dilemmas of the time, Lévy and a group of young writers founded Les Nouveau Philosophes, breaking with the fashionable Marxist position of the time.

Since then, and throughout his career as a bestselling writer, he has often acted as an adviser to the government, but always remained his own man politically. Sarkozy was a friend, but Lévy refused to vote for him in the 2007 elections, campaigning for Ségolène Royal instead. “He was very angry,” he shrugs. “I can separate friendship with political affiliation, but not he, so for three years we didn’t speak.” In April, he voted for François Hollande, “although with a lot less passion than I did for Ségolène”. This is surprising. As a multi-millionaire many times over (when his father died, Lévy sold off his timber company, Becob, for £84 million – to entrepreneur François Pinault), he can’t be looking forward to his next tax bill. “That’s OK,” he says, nonplussed. OK? They’re going to take away 75 per cent of his income. “I’m happy to pay my taxes,” he assures me, “and I will pay 75 per cent because I’m privileged and I have a duty of solidarity towards my fellow countrymen.”

It’s harder to imagine Lévy in frayed shirt collars than buttoned up and wearing a tie, and it seems a shame that the philosopher’s intellectual distinction should be blurred by such frivolous considerations. In an uncharacteristic moment of modesty in the film, he claims that he is “not a man of action”. Even his greatest critics would dispute that from someone whose new project is “to use the film to help things change in Syria – to call for a similar intervention”. Given that the philosopher’s role is all too often to sit in an attic and ruminate, Lévy may need to redefine his title – invent a new term. “Yes,” he nods gravely. “Involved philosopher or philosopher on the ground might be better. But there will come a day when I won’t be able to go out and do these things. Perhaps then I’ll take time to ruminate.”